The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald
at any rate!”
So he took me round his place, pointing out his jasmine and sundals and the rest, exclaiming about their night scents, and suddenly snatching up a trowel and falling on some weeds. “These confounded Chinese gardeners!” cries he. “I’d be better served by Red Indians, I believe. But I suppose it’s asking too much to expect,” he cries, trowelling away, “that a people as filthy, ugly, and ungraceful as the Chinks should have any feeling for flowers. Mind you, they’re industrious and cheery, but that ain’t the same.”
He chattered on, pointing out how his house was built carefully on palm piles to defy the bugs and damp, and telling me how he had come to design it. “We’d had the deuce of a scrap with Lundu head-hunters just across the river yonder, and were licking our wounds in a dirty little kampong, waiting for ’em to attack again – it was evening, and we were out of water altogether, and pretty used up, down to our last ounces of powder, too – and I thought to myself, what you need, J.B. my boy, is an easy chair and an English newspaper and a vase of roses on the table. It seemed such a splendid notion – and I resolved that I’d make myself a house, with just those things, so that wherever I went in Borneo, it would always be here to return to.” He waved at the house. “And there she is – all complete, except for the roses. I’ll get those in time.”
It was true enough; his big central room, with the bedrooms arranged round it, and an opening on to his front verandah, was for all the world like a mixture of drawing-room and gun-room at home, except that the furniture was mostly bamboo. There were easy chairs, and old copies of The Times and Post neatly stacked, couches, polished tables, an Axminster, flowers in vases, and all manner of weapons and pictures on the walls.
“If ever I want to forget wars and pirates and fevers and ong-ong-ongs – that’s my own word for anything Malay, you know – I just sit down and read about how it rained in Bath last year, or how some rascal was jailed for poaching at Exeter Assizes,” says he. “Even potato prices in Lancashire will do – oh, I say … I’d meant to put that away …”
I’d stopped to look at a miniature on the table, of a most peachy blonde girl, and Brooke jumped up and reached out towards it. I seemed to know the face. “Why,” says I, “that’s Angie Coutts, surely?”
“You know her?” cries he, and he was pink to the gills, and right out of countenance for once. “I have never had the honour of meeting her,” he went on, in a hushed, stuffed way, “but I have long admired her, for her enlightened opinions, and unsparing championship of worthy causes.” He looked at the miniature like a contemplative frog. “Tell me – is she as … as … well – ah – as her portrait suggests?”
“She’s a stunner, if that’s what you mean,” says I, for like every other grown male in London I, too, had admired little Angie, though not entirely for her enlightened opinions – more for the fact that she had a superb complexion, tits like footballs, and two million in the bank, really. I’d taken a loving fumble at her myself, during blind-man’s-buff at a party in Stratton Street, but she’d simply stared straight ahead of her and dislocated my thumb. Wasteful little prude.20
“Perhaps, one of these days, when I return to England, you will present me,” says he, gulping, and shovelled her picture into a drawer. Well, well, thinks I, who’d have thought it: the mad pirate-killer and rose-fancier, spoony on Angie Coutts’s picture – I’ll bet that every time he contemplates it the local Dyak lasses have to scamper for cover.
I must have said something to this effect, in my tasteful way, that same evening to Stuart, no doubt with my lewd Flashy nudge and leer, but he was such an innocent that he just shook his head and sighed deeply.
“Miss Burdett-Coutts?” says he. “Poor old J.B. He has told me of his deep regard for her, although he’s a very secret man about such things. I dare say they’d make a splendid match, but it can’t be, of course – even if he realized his ambition to meet her.”
“Why not?” says I. “He’s a likely chap, and just the kind to fire a romantic piece like young Angie. Why, they’d go like duck and green peas.” Kindly old match-maker Flash, you see.
“Impossible,” says Stuart, and then he went red in the face and hesitated. “You see – it’s a shocking thing – but J.B. can never marry – it wouldn’t do, at all.”
Hollo, thinks I, he ain’t one of the Dick’s hatband brigade, surely? – I’d not have thought it.
“It is never mentioned, of course,” says Stuart, uncomfortably, “but it is as well you should know – in case, in conversation, you unwittingly made any reference that might … well, be wounding. It was in Burma, you see, when he was in the army. He received an … incapacitating injury in battle. It was put about that it was a bullet in the lung … but in fact … well, it wasn’t.”
“Good G-d, you don’t mean to say,” cries I, genuinely appalled, “that he got his knocker shot off?”
“Let’s not think about it,” says he, but I can tell you I went about wincing for the rest of the evening. Poor old White Raja – I mean, I’m a callous chap enough, but there are some tragedies that truly wring the heart. Mad about that delectable little bouncer Angie Coutts, despot of a country abounding with the juiciest of dusky flashtails just itching for him to exercise the droit de seigneur, and there he was with a broken firing-pin. I don’t know when I’ve been more deeply moved. Still, if J.B. was the first man in to rescue Elspeth, she’d be safe enough.21
It was an appropriate thought, for that same evening, after dinner at The Grove, we held the council at which Brooke announced his plan of operations. It followed a dinner as formal in its way as any I’ve ever attended – but that was Brooke all over: when we had our pegs on the verandah beforehand he was laughing and sky-larking, playing leap-frog with Stuart and Crimble and even the dour Paitingi, the bet being that he could jump over them one after another with a glass in one hand, and not spill a drop – but when the bell sounded, everyone quieted down, and filed silently into his great room.
I can still see it, Brooke at the head of the table in his big armchair, stiff in his white collar and carefully-tied black neckercher, with black coat and ruffled cuffs, the eager brown face grave for once, and the only thing out of place his untidy black curls – he could never get ’em to lie straight. On one side of him was Keppel, in full fig of uniform dress coat and epaulette, with his best black cravat, looking sleepy and solemn; Stuart and I in the cleanest ducks we could find; Charlie Wade, Keppel’s lieutenant; Paitingi Ali, very brave in a tunic of dark plaid trimmed with gold and with a great crimson sash, and Crimble, another of Brooke’s lieutenants, who absolutely had a frock coat and fancy weskit. There was a Malay steward behind each chair, and over in the corner, silent but missing nothing, the squint-faced Jingo; even he had exchanged his loin-cloth for a silver sarong, with hornbill feathers in his hair and decorating the shaft of his sumpitanb standing handy against the wall. I never saw him without it, or the little bamboo quiver of his beastly darts.
I don’t remember much of the meal, except that the food was good and the wine execrable, and that conversation consisted of Brooke lecturing interminably; like most active men, he had all the makings of a thoroughgoing bore.
“There shan’t be a missionary in Borneo if I can help it,” I remember him saying, “for there are only two kinds, bad ones and Americans. The bad ones ram Christianity down the natives’ throats and tell them their own gods are false—”
“Which they are,” says Keppel quietly.
“Of course, but a gentleman doesn’t tell ’em so,” says Brooke. “The Yankees have the right notion; they devote themselves to medicine and education, and don’t talk religion or politics. And they don’t treat natives as inferiors – that’s where we’ve gone wrong in India,” says he, wagging his finger at me, as though I had framed British policy. “We’ve made them conscious of their inferiority, which is a great folly. After all, if you’ve a weaker younger brother, you encourage him to think he can run as fast as you can, or jump as far without a race,